Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
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Olivia Bloechl specializes in European and North American music history from 1500-1750, with a focus on colonial Atlantic music cultures and on French baroque opera. She also publishes and teaches in the areas of postcolonial studies, continental theory and philosophy (especially poststructuralism), historiography, and ethics of history. Reflecting these interests, her research is broadly concerned with problems of difference in musical life, particularly colonial and racial difference. Her first book, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), is a cultural history of music in early European colonization, which traces the influence of colonial representation of Native American music on musical life in Europe and the colonies. She is currently researching and writing a new book, The Politics of Memory in French Baroque Opera, supported in part by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship awarded for 2008-2009. (http://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=6f32e9b1-ac16-dc11-9d54-000c2903e717). In conjunction with this research she is planning a conference on the Politics of French Baroque Opera in the Ancien Régime, scheduled for February 27-28, 2009, at the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. She is also co-organizing (with Ingrid Monson and Sindhu Revuluri) an exploratory seminar on "Postcolonial Music Studies," which will be hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University) in early summer, 2009. 

Prof. Bloechl teaches in the first-year graduate series (200B: Historiography), and she has given graduate seminars on topics such as music and early Atlantic colonialism, French baroque opera, and postcolonial theory. She is tentatively planning graduate seminars in the next few years on "Music, History, and Memory" and on "Music and Ethical Relation." Undergraduate course topics include early European music, baroque opera, and exoticism in Western music. She serves on the faculty advisory committee for the UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral Program in the Humanities, "Cultures in Transnational Perspective." She is also an enthusiastic pianist and harpsichordist, and is particularly fond of chamber music.